


It Might As Well Be Spring

by bronwins



Category: The Man in the High Castle (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Cheating, Childhood Sweethearts, F/M, First Love, Light to Medium Angst, Love Doesn't Mean Everything's Going to Be Okay, No Excuse For Naziism, Original Character(s), Period Typical Attitudes, True Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-27
Updated: 2017-02-01
Packaged: 2018-09-20 02:54:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9472352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bronwins/pseuds/bronwins
Summary: "The things we love tell us who we are." -Thomas AquinasTrue love lasts forever. True love doesn't always fix everything.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Well and true AU-ness, obviously, considering this details a good deal of Smith's life, pre-Reich. I'm going out on a limb with ages here-let's pretend that Smith is 42? Seem right to anyone else? I literally know no one else who is interested in this show, so I'm going on my own judgement here.
> 
> Don't know if this will ever get finished (I'm not good at that), but I'm gonna do my best. As always, feedback fills my heart with joy.

**Spring, 1922**

When they were children together, she let him run his hands through her hair.

Children of that age-perhaps ten or eleven-seldom understand the significance of such an act; the heartbreaking, near-taboo intimacy of it. They would lie on the rocks in Central Park in spring, warming themselves in the sun like reptiles, and she would unpack thick, auburn locks from their braids and let him feel the soft wave between his fingers.

More often than not, he would run into knots - at that age, she was very much focused on the exploits of the Boxcar Children and Dorothy of Oz, and not quite as much on hair care. It was tradition, at these times, for a small screaming match and scuffle to ensue (his mother always wondered what he and little Vee Adler got up to, that they came home so bruised and bloodied), but always, as the sun sunk in the sky, her hair blanketed his stomach yet again, and he played with its ends. They were silent as they sucked the thick, heady May air into their lungs; as they stood with reluctance and began making their way homeward, the lamps flickering on at their backs. The spell was only broken when they returned to the pavement side of 69th Street, when quietude was no longer necessary, seemly, or bearable.

"Are your parents home yet?" She asked. John checked his battered wristwatch - a prize his father brought back for him from the Battle of the Somme. Six-thirty. They'd been home for an hour.

"No," he said, furrowing his brow, as though that would make him appear in any way honest. "Can I come over for a little while?"

She smiled, mouth too wide for a child's face. His heart thundered in his chest.

"Yeah, come on." Little hands, still sticky and grass-stained, found each other as they ambled eastward in the dying light of the afternoon.

* * *

"Vee?" He ground them to a halt beneath a flickering streetlight on the corner of 73rd Street and 2nd Avenue, pulling her into him a little unwittingly.

"Yeah?"

His face-mottled red, even in the lengthening shadows-was upturned toward her, and he felt that her hand had gone clammy in his.

"Can I kiss you?"

* * *

He had been planning this moment since the day they'd met-the first day of fourth grade, nearly a year and a half prior to that potent moment on an Upper East Side corner. He'd been the new kid, a little scrap of nothing from the Middle of Nowhere, New Jersey, with dark curls that hung heavy in his eyes and a wide mouth permanently curled downward. The first half of that day was spent languishing in the back of classrooms and doodling between lines of fastidious notes. He had nearly escaped for the day without incident, when a red-headed wildling rushed, headlong, into his laden arms. They and their books went flying into the air, and when the dust cleared, he turned to find a girl about a year his senior lying in a pool of papers, cackling.

"I'm-I'm so sorry-"

"Oh man, is this a mess or what!" She fixed him with a grin that was absolute in its radiance, the kind of inner joy that only children really possess.

"I'm Vee. Are you alright?"

"Yes, I'm fine, I'm really-"

"Good to meet you," She crawled to him, mopping the filthy school hallway with stocking-clad knees, and wrung his hand. He, so stunned by her onslaught of good will, sat back on his heels and forgot to give his name. "Now, you need any help cleaning this up?"

* * *

"Sure," she said, momentarily too nonchalant. "I mean-yes. I'd like-yes."

She was an inch or two taller than him, and there was a moment of awkwardness before he shifted and fit them together like puzzle pieces.

"Oh," she said, a little breathless, as they broke apart. "I. That was-we should-look, my mom is gonna have a cow if we're not back for dinner."

He laughed first. The notion of her mother's anger was surreal, fantastical, as though he were Dorothy and had landed on the Wicked Witch of the East for the first time, and as though her understanding of the madness of it all was intuitive, she followed suit. Soon, they were stumbling down the street, giggling like loons and clutching at each other, and when Mrs. Adler asked, over leftover potato _kugel_ , what in the hell was so funny, they dissolved again.

* * *

Curled up in the rickety bunk bed, he tried to memorize the facts of her amidst his brother's gentle snores above and his parent's stage-whispered argument in the hall. She tasted like springtime and the cola they'd shared after school, and the skin of her face was only a little wind-chapped. He had never seen eyes like hers-as soft and brown as a dairy cow's, until they burned with a fire he didn't know she possessed.

"Vera Adler," he whispered into his pillow, thinking of the way her face was flushed when he pulled away from her, how she pulled her lower lip between her teeth in an effort to stifle a girlish grin. "Vera. Adler." With eyes closed tight, he made believe that they were back on the rocks, her hair long and sweet and tangled up in his hands. That night, he drifted off to sleep with a smile curling in the corner of his mouth.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "She hovered over him, shifting her weight from foot to foot, and seemed to be trying to avoid noticing that he'd placed Mein Kampf carefully on his nightstand."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two chapters in two days? Unheard of.

**Spring, 1927**

"What in God's name is wrong with you?" He wasn't adverse to seeing Vee at any time of day, but he had to admit that 5 AM was pushing the boundaries of good taste. And odd, considering he'd never seen her willingly awake before 9. His eyes snapped open as she thundered into his bedroom like a freight train.

"What are you talking about, and-wait, what are you doing in my room? Do you know what time it is? Who let you in?"

"I have keys, your mom's at work, and your father's downtown. What is _wrong_ with you?"

He noticed that she was already dressed for school as he hauled himself up, curls making a heroic reach for the ceiling. For a moment it flickered across his mind that she'd probably been awake since 3:30 between performing her daily ablutions and planning her entrance. The thought of it gripped him with a bizarre urge to laugh.

"This fell out of your bag after you left my house," she tossed a well-thumbed volume at him. "Did you know that the guy who wrote that-he's not letting Jewish people join the army anymore?"

"It's 5 in the morning, Vee. Jeez."

That spring, their discourse had devolved steadily into little more than shouting matches and huffily slamming doors in each other's faces. They were normal teenagers; so consumed with their own righteousness that there was no room in their iron-clad ideology for the thoughts or feelings of others.

"I'm serious. My cousin Aryeh in Munich wrote my mom and I, and said he can't join up because he's Jewish," He was consumed by the way her skirt moved as she paced the rough wooden floor of his bedroom. "He said this guy is the one that made that law."

"Oh, come on. Your cousin's probably just physically unfit and looking for someone to blame," he snatched the book from her grasp. "And you should read it sometime, Vee, it's really interesting."

"Yeah right. You know they didn't even vote for him?"

"That's not true-"

"I'm serious," she lowered her voice, as though telling him some dark secret. "He's-I don't know. He's not good. Aryeh wouldn't lie about something like this, you know? It's just not in his nature."

"I don't know your cousin, and it doesn't matter. This is what you came to talk about?" He sighed, and flopped back down. That singular quality of hers, that ability to switch between anger and earnestness in seconds, exhausted him this morning, when it was so often such an endearing thing.

"I haven't seen you in almost three weeks," he muttered. "Want to talk about that at all?" She hovered over him and said nothing, shifting her weight from foot to foot, and seemed to be trying to avoid noticing that he'd placed _Mein Kampf_ carefully on his nightstand.

"Look," He said, at length. "I have to go to work."

"Say you're sick." She stripped her coat and sat on the edge of his bed.

"Oh yeah, as soon as I'm sick they give the job to someone else, and then who'll put food on the table?"

"I read some of it," When she leaned over him to reach the nightstand, he breathed deeply. Laundry and lemon tea, maybe a hint of the cigarettes her mother always seemed to be smoking. She flipped to a coffee-stained page, tucked her legs up underneath her, and began to read. "'Here he stops at nothing, and in his vileness he becomes so gigantic that no one need be surprised if among our people the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.' What _is_ that, John?"

Silence hung between them like a fog, and he was truly grateful in that moment for the dimness of the room, so she could not see his cheeks burn.

"I need to go," he muttered. "I'm sorry, I just need to get to work."

They stood at the same time, rigid in their near-synchronicity. The sun was finally beginning to creep over the horizon-now, he could trace the stress knots on her shoulders beneath her school dress.

"See you at school, then." Her eyes were purposely averted as she tried to march past him, but even from a foot and a half away he knew they were glittering with tears. In a moment, he was utterly filled with self-hatred; mouth flapping like a fish as he attempted to find the words to make her stay, to make her smile-at the very least, to make sure she didn't hate him.

"I had to talk my mom down, by the way," she said, eyes flashing and too close, breathing his air and taking up his space. "From never letting you in the house again. I said you found it in school and were throwing it away."

"If your mom doesn't want me at your house, I won't go to your house." It was the wrong thing to say, so childish and petulant, but she stood still, hands crammed in her coat pockets.

"I'm not going to tell her you said that," He found himself watching her lips make those words; trying to sense if she was leaning closer. "Apologize to me."

He slipped his thumb and forefinger inside the sleeve of her coat and pushed it back, wrapping his hand gently around the thinnest part of her wrist.

"I'm sorry."

They moved together slowly, barely breathing, as his little room filled with golden light.

* * *

"You're late, Smith," Mr Fabian's eyes were glued to the clipboard by which he lived his life. "Late again, no job and no pay."

"Sorry sir," He took a pair of battered work gloves from his back pocket and pulled them on, jogging around the corner to the back of the supermarket. Three trucks were lined up, and approximately a half-dozen other boys and men were unloading their contents.

"Idiot." A man twice his age muttered behind a carton of apples. John tried to shake the morning from his mind and focus on unloading the trucks. When the memory of it-her hissed demand of an apology, then her lips on his, their bodies pressed against each other tightly-crashed over him like an unexpected wave, he nearly lost his grip on an entire crate of fresh eggs.

"Get your head out of your ass, boy!" The man shouted. Though John sneered at him, privately, he agreed. _Get your head out of your ass, John_. The unloading continued much as it always did, with him battling for clarity amid a sea of thoughts of her.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Don't be a goddamn fool, kid," he called, voice fading against the sounds of other men unloading other burdened little boats all along the pier. "You're as dispensable as they come."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IMPORTANT: after some very serious (read: tipsy) number-crunching, I've come to the conclusion that it's simply not feasible for John to be 42 at the beginning of the show. As such, I've redone the math for 50, which I think is much more accurate. If that's overshooting it a little, I don't mind as much as trying to fit a distinguished career in the armed forces, a marriage, three kids, and a non-canon story in the same year. I've updated the previous time stamps on the chapters to reflect that-thankfully there wasn't a lot of time period based detail in either one, or I'd be mired down forever.
> 
> Serious AU-ness to follow, or, "What Was John Doing Before It All Went Wrong?"

**Spring, 1931**

"Always late, Smith," Mr Fabian, clutching his clipboard like a raft on a river, surveyed John with watering, bloodshot eyes. "What the hell am I supposed to do with you?"

It was a humid night in May, and the air was heavy with the smell of the Chelsea Piers-salt, rotting wood, sulfur, and the sweat and bile of men. It would've been a romantic place if it weren't for that smell, John thought, and if it weren't for the constant buzz of (perhaps less-than-savory) activity. Not to mention, of course, the unwelcome addition of his piggy employer. It had been a long time since John had unloaded boxes behind Kelso's Grocery-nearly three years now-but somehow, Mr Fabian had followed him from one dead-end job to another, constantly watching with that pinched, puffed face and finding ways to berate him.

"Ah...well, nothing," He hardly made the effort to upset Mr Fabian-though that wasn't to say that he succeeded, no matter what effort he made-but on that night, in the bare, yellow light of a streetlamp, he felt cocky. "Maybe since it's payday, you ought to pay me."

"Watch it," Mr Fabian didn't move an inch, back pressed against a damp brick wall. "You're not here for smart remarks. Just load the boxes in the truck, and don't make trouble."

He glanced over the dock at the dinghy below, so laden with precious cargo that it barely sat an inch above the water.

"A lot of boxes means a lot of risk," he said flatly. "If I'm going to chance getting spotted like this, I want a pay raise."

Mr Fabian laughed a shrill little laugh and tossed John the keys to the truck, already retreating to the shadows of the dank alleyway.

"Don't be a goddamn fool, kid," he called, voice fading against the sounds of other men unloading other burdened little boats all along the pier. "You're as dispensable as they come."

* * *

"Where the hell you been, boy?"

Lukas Smith, a grey-haired jackknife of a man, swayed in the doorstep of their Upper East Side apartment, three days unshaven and as drunk as John had ever seen him.

"Hi Dad. Working. You know it's after three in the morning, right?"

"Get in the house." John resisted the bizarre urge to smile as he breezed by his father, into the dark front hall of their ramshackle building.

Lukas Smith hadn't always been this way. Maybe the monster had always been curled in his chest, peacefully dormant until the world had fallen down around him and he'd lost everything the family had. John had a mind full of memories of who he considered his "real father," a charming bank clerk with a pleasantly toothy smile-a man who spoke three languages fluently and who loved little dogs.

"You need to start paying rent, or get out," he slurred, nearly falling into one of their rickety dining chairs. "Too old to be freeloading." John sighed deeply, and seated himself across the table.

"Do you need money?" Lukas Smith looked as though he'd been spat on.

"Money? No boy, no, _you_ need to learn some responsibilities," his salt-and-pepper head was heading for the tabletop, drool already pooling at the corners of his mouth. "All you do is sit around...play with that little girlfriend of yours."

John had never blamed his father for what had happened to their family. He didn't blame him for losing their money and his job; didn't blame him when his mother got sick and they had no money to treat it. He didn't even blame him when she died-and she had died ugly; sweating, pale, and drowning in a lungful of bodily fluid.

He had never blamed his father, but it didn't mean that Lukas Smith hadn't blamed himself.

"Dad, Vera's been in college since fall." He wondered if his father could hear that twinge of sadness in his voice. He wondered if he cared.

He was already fast asleep, curled up against himself like a weevil and snoring gently. John left him there and stole into his little bedroom, the one he'd kissed Vee in all those years ago. From his patched canvas rucksack, he retrieved his daily pay: $25 and a pilfered bottle of Canadian Rye Whiskey. After peeling three bills from the stack and setting them aside for his father, he laid back on the threadbare mattress and pulled the stubborn cork from the neck of the bottle.

As he took a swig, the memory of that morning returned, soft and golden, as though not a moment had passed.

"Cheers, Vee." he murmured, surrendering, at last, to the welcoming arms of sleep.

* * *

"When will you be back?" John pressed the payphone's heavy black receiver hard against his face. He'd spent nearly an hour (and close to forty cents) wedged in the drugstore's musty-smelling phonebox, ignoring the exasperated sighs of a growing line of other expectant patrons.

"Soon!" Though the phone line popped and hissed, her excitement on the other end was palpable. "I'm leaving tonight. Last train out of Boston."

"They just let you go?" He asked. "Or are you playing hooky?"

"I'll have you know I take my education very seriously," she'd raised her voice to be heard over the constant static, which made her every utterance come out in something of a squeak. He bit his lip to keep from giggling. "Anyway, even if I was, wouldn't be too smart to ditch school when I'm on break, would it?"

"Not for a college girl like you," he said. "I always imagined they kept you all in leg irons over there." She laughed, bright and carefree, and his heart thudded against his ribs.

"Don't confuse your fantasies with reality, John," the line crackled loudly-a sign, surely, of the operator's impending intrusion. "Sounds like we're almost out of time."

"Wait, Vee-" He racked his brain for something to say. "How about Small's Paradise tomorrow? It'll be fun-the band is still pretty good. We could, uh, catch up." he hoped that their poor connection would mask how desperate he sounded in that moment; that she couldn't somehow hear the blush creeping from his neck to his hairline.

"Smalls Paradise? How-how can you afford that?"

"I-what? Of course I can afford it."

"I just mean it's an expensive place-"

"Vee," he imagined that, were this conversation happening in person, he'd take her by the shoulders and squeeze them. She'd smell like honeysuckle-that hair, so long, would be brushed simply over one shoulder, a sprig of violets resting behind her left ear. She'd touch his face and angle her lips perfectly, so he could catch them with his before finishing his sentence. "Don't worry about it, okay? Let's go, come on."

"Well. If you're sure, okay? Tell me now, because God knows _I_ haven't got that kind of money-"

"Pick you up at eight?"

She went quiet for a moment, as though weighing her options. He only hoped that he measured up.

"I'll see you then, John." The way she said his name made him shudder.

He slammed the phone against the reciever before the operator's disconcerting shrill could demand another nickel from him, and bounded from the drugstore a brand new man.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> New York City was along one of the most prominent "Rum Rows" in the country during the Prohibition period. It became a central hub for the trafficking of banned alcohol, smuggling in everything from bathtub gin and moonshine to champagne. Young men of all ages, but most particularly in their late teens/early twenties, were often hired by smugglers to take small speedboats or dinghies between cargo ships that carried the contraband and shore. These young men were easily singled out and arrested, and often were slapped with lengthy sentences because smugglers were not inclined to help them.  
> Because work was so scarce in the Great Depression, young men flocked to work like this, that offered a substantial amount of cash, and that had a very high turnover.


End file.
